Barefoot In The City

My CFMs underwent a catastrophic failure while I was teetering at the top of a very tall flight of stairs, so all in all I was lucky the only thing that broke was the right heel and not my neck.

8 years I've had those boots, damnit. I got citizenised in them. But I've clearly been tottering around in them just a little too often.

"When that happened to me," Kylie offered. "I just took it to one of those shops you find everywhere, you know, the little shops, and I was standing there in my socks, and they repaired it while I waited."

"Great!" I said. "Where?"

"Uh, Melbourne."

I unlaced and folded my boots away into my bag with a sniffle, went hunting for a set of Yellow Pages (fortunately the one I needed was not the one propping up a monitor), then trotted off in my bare soles to the closest listed boot repairs in Trinity Arcade.

(By coincidence I ran into some Yellow Pages people in the mall, but they were giving away free Found It! notepads and weren't actually any real help at all. Seriously, it's a notepad you use when you're looking for stuff and if/when you find it you tick the Found It! box.)

There, I showed the cobbler my boot with its heel swinging loose, and my bare feet. He understood the urgency of my situation at once.

"Well," he said. "I could glue it back on, and it might last 5 metres, or I could put a new sole on it, but it'll cost you $45-$50 and it won't be a today job. There's nothing else I can do for it."

"So it's dead?"

"It's very dead."

I packed my boot away and went shoe-shopping. The black-and-white tiled floor in Trinity, incidentally, has an odd depression pattern - was it actually laid that way, and was it caused by generations of pedestrians repeatedly stomping on the black squares? And if you think those patterned pavers for the visually impaired are hard on your feet, try walking on them bare-soled.

Going through the arcades, I felt like Gollum, bare feet slapping on cold polished stone floors... Crossing Adelaide Tce was rough, though, and not receommended.

And you certainly entertain some interesting stares from security and staff when you go browsing in the shoes section of a major department store in your dirty naked feet.

Alas, my quest was in vain. There're a few nice boots out there, but I think for the price of new boots I'd rather just go resole my old ones and invest in a set of proper work shoes to stomp around the office in.